Dive Brief:
- Enterprises hoping to get cloud costs under control are aiming to reduce wasted spend and leverage commitment-based hyperscaler discounts, according to the FinOps Foundation. The organization surveyed 1,245 organizations that spend an average of $44 million annually on cloud services for its fifth annual State of FinOps report.
- Companies are bracing for a surge in cloud consumption to power compute-intensive generative AI applications, the report found. While only 31% of respondents said AI/ML costs have moved the needle on FinOps, an additional 15% are expecting usage to mount soon.
- “AI is following the same model we saw when cloud adoption started,” FinOps Foundation Executive Director J.R. Storment said. “There's all this unbounded experimentation and spinning up of new services and nobody quite understands the pricing models until you hit the bill-shock moment.”
Dive Insight:
FinOps emerged in response to a critical mass of alarming cloud bills, as enterprises struggled to tie escalating costs to projected efficiency gains, product development and revenue.
Practitioners initially focused on equipping engineering teams with tools to curb usage and reduce spending on cloud compute, a top priority among respondents in the survey’s first four years. But waves of economic uncertainty drove organizations to think more broadly about trimming cost and optimizing spend, surfacing deeper cloud budget concerns.
Rather than reducing consumption, organizations are now more concerned with cost-consciously expanding cloud usage, the report found. More than half of respondents said eliminating waste and tapping into unused resources was a top FinOps focus. Leveraging built-in hyperscaler discount instruments and finding ways to more accurately forecast spending were also priorities.
“The idea of the practice is not to use less cloud,” Storment said. “It's to make sure you're getting the most value out of what you are using.”
The major cloud providers promised to help customers optimize spending last year. AWS, Microsoft and Google are premier members of the FinOps Foundation and all three joined a related effort to rationalize billing practices, the FinOps Open Cost and Usage Specification, also called FOCUS.
As providers expand provisioning options and add to new features, including an expanding roster of AI models, complexity grows. “Every iteration of cloud billing gets better, deeper and more granular,” Storment said. “But it actually gets harder because there’s 700,000 SKUs in cloud now.”
As the practices take hold, FinOps is spreading beyond the boundaries of cloud, to hybrid and on-prem ecosystems. The organization revised its definition of FinOps earlier this month, expanding the scope of its practices.
“Historically, we focused on public cloud,” said Storment, “but we’ve removed ‘public’ because practitioners have started to look at SaaS spend, at hybrid and at what one of our tech members called ‘cloud-like things’ that have variable spend.”
